Movie Tagger is conceived as a project to, humbly, “parse and richly tag every movie ever made.” How? By engaging an online community of scholars and fans – “crowd-sourcing.” It was first proposed in 2007 inside the USC School of Cinematic Arts Interactive Media Division and was “adopted” by the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation. Last fall it received sponsored research funding from Related Content Database Inc (RCDb), a next generation TV software and data services company with a strong R&D focus.

iMAP doctoral student Josh McVeigh-Schultz and IML undergrad Jason Lipshin will be joined by Eddie Elliot of RCDb, to present their research findings to date, designated “Movie Tagger Alpha”, the first stage of a larger initiative. It includes interviews with SCA faculty members to better understand metadata ontologies and, based on these interviews, macro-level visualizations of specific movies and television programs using RCDb data and visualization tools.